As Seen in Vanity Fair's August 2006 Issue!
As Seen in US News & World Report's September 11 Fifth Anniversary Issue!
As Seen in Time Magazine's September 11, 2006 Issue!
As Seen in Phoenix New Times' August 9, 2007 Issue!

Friday, August 17, 2007

Zeitgeist Gets the Raspberry from Major Canadian Newspaper

I'll confess that my initial reaction to Zeitgeist was that it was entertaining in the lunatic first section about religion, idiotic and offensive in the second part about 9-11 and extremely boring in the third part about the international bankers. But apparently it has become the hot new video among the kook set, replacing 9-11 Mysteries and Loose Change as the Truthers hunger for fresh nuttery.

The movie comes in three parts. The first makes the case that Jesus is a mythological figure built from parts of earlier mythological figures. Christianity, say the filmmakers, is a concoction, just a form of social control.

So far, nothing ground-breaking. But now the movie jumps to 9/11, and things really get moving. The middle segment steps us through the orthodoxy of 9/11 conspiracy thinking. The twin towers weren't destroyed by jetliners; they were intentionally demolished with explosives. Something fishy happened to Flight 93, which the banker-controlled media will tell you crashed in Pennsylvania.

The Air Force, we're told, deliberately failed to intercept any of the planes. Meanwhile, the Pentagon wasn't hit by an airliner, but by something more like a missile. All of this leads to the conclusion that 9/11 was an inside job, staged by elements of the U.S. government to provide a pretext for invading Iraq and curtailing civil liberties.

To what end? Warming to its topic, the film shimmers into its third act. It seems that the Federal Reserve, the U.S. money-printing organ, is in fact the implement of a small cabal of International Bankers (the ethnicity of these money-lenders goes undisclosed) who stage global calamities to spur federal spending and enrich themselves.

You know how it is; the religion part seems true to the reviewer so he doesn't catch onto the lunacy there (a very intelligent atheist told me that he was banging his head on the keyboard during that segment), but he certainly catches the rest of the nonsense:

What troubles me the most is that, for all the talk of skepticism, conspiracy counterculture is really an anti-intellectual, populist movement - much like Intelligent Design. For all their absurdity, conspiracy theorists try to drag everything back to the level of common sense.